Obama’s Gun Plan: Sense or Sensibility?

It takes the National Rifle Association to build a campaign for guns around resentment toward children—specifically, resentment toward two girls named Sasha and Malia. On Tuesday, a month after twenty first graders were shot dead in Newtown, Connecticut, and a day before President Obama was set to announce a set of proposals for curbing gun violence, the N.RA. released a video that opened with a cartoon image of an arm holding a lunchbox with the Presidential seal on it. “Are the President’s kids more important than yours?” it asks. Obama’s children, the narrator says, have armed guards at their school; why don’t yours? Obama wants rich people’s money—there is a shot of him gloating over a pile of cash—“but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.” He gets guns, while ordinary Americans are shunted off into ominous gun-free school zones. Gun laws, apparently, are the new busing.

Perhaps the N.R.A. could have made a more frank play for fear and anger—maybe with an ad showing federal forces breaking into homes and melting down rifles. But it could hardly have been more transparent or, for an organization that works hard for the interests of gun manufacturers, more cynical. [Update: White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement that for the N.R.A. “to go so far as to make the safety of the President’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.”] The personal animosity toward Obama is striking, but it is no longer entirely surprising; the N.R.A. will throw whatever it can get its hands on, even dirt, even things that are uglier. The White House will need to reckon with that or it will waste a moment in which there is an opening, however narrow, to get something done about gun control. Guns cannot be another area in which Obama underestimates the irrationality of the other side until it’s too late for him to do anything but look like the sane one.

In talking about what he wants to do about guns, Obama has tried, as much as he can, to sound like a practical man. In a press conference earlier this week, he said he would be coming to the American people with “a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again.” In the few minutes that followed he used variations on the same phrase a half dozen times, talking about what he could do “in a sensible way that comports with the Second Amendment”; “what makes sense”; “common-sense gun control”; and, again, “some sensible steps that we can take.” Responsible gun owners, he said, had nothing to worry about from “some sensible, responsible legislation in this area.”

The proposals he will reportedly introduce on Wednesday do, indeed, sound sensible, addressing the sorts of things that many Americans might be surprised to realize are even legal, like the “gun-show” or private-dealer loophole, which allows many gun-buyers to circumvent the few background checks that are on the books if they buy their weapons at an exhibition or just from someone who put an ad on the Web. The President is expected to ask Congress to renew the assault-weapons ban and put limits on the sizes of magazines of bullets. According to Politico, there will also be a proposal for a new interstate gun-trafficking law.

Some of these measures “will require legislation,” Obama said, which may be difficult at a time when Congress is one of the few institutions more fevered than the N.R.A. “Some of them I can accomplish through executive action,” he added. According to press reports, there could be as many as a nineteen executive orders. [UPDATE: In the end, there were twenty-three executive orders and actions.] The President will tell the Justice Department to enforce the laws we have. (As it is, no one really expects to be punished for lying on background-check forms, for example.) He’ll put in place some import regulations, and have federal agencies share mental-health records. And he’ll tell the Centers for Disease Control, which is supposed to study the things that kill, sicken, and injure Americans, to take a hard look at the effects of gun violence. Gun lobbyists had worked to prevent the C.D.C. from doing its job in this area—a bizarre priority, but a characteristic one. Who but the N.R.A. would make obliviousness an agenda item?

These measures, too, sound relatively modest. And yet Steve Stockman, a Republican Congressman from Texas, has already called them grounds for impeachment, saying “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary.” Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s attorney general, asked by Newsmax about the potential use of executive orders, also said that if Obama “tried to override the Second Amendment in any way, I believe it would be an impeachable offense.” The President is presented not as a political opponent, but as a criminal. This weekend, on “Meet the Press,” Colin Powell, a longtime Republican, talked about “a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the Party.” He saw it in characterizations of the President, and in the G.O.P.’s dismissal of minorities and the poor. We should be prepared to see it invade the gun debate.

To counter this, Obama offers the sensible—and he should never stop doing so. Madness in one’s opponents is no excuse for abandoning good sense; it makes it even more imperative to hold onto it as hard as one can. But if it is all one comes with, one risks slipping into a state of defeated self-satisfaction. If the gun conversation is not taking place in the realm of sense, Obama has to figure out how to actively drag it back there.

Sense needs to be joined with a sensibility that approaches the passion of the days after the Newtown shooting, when we couldn’t banish the pictures of children running out of the school, who were told to keep their eyes shut so they wouldn’t see the dead. The clear awareness of tragedy is the sort of emotion that can clarify a debate that has been muddled by murky fears. Obama can be better than anyone at speaking this language, if he is ready to do it. He might need to get a little angry. We need to talk about good sense when it comes to gun control. After Newtown, and Aurora, and Tucson, and a dozen other places, we also need to talk about things like courage and shame. In his press conference, Obama said that he’d make his proposals, “And then members of Congress I think are going to have to have a debate and examine their own conscience.” They will, and he, and the rest of us, can’t let them forget it.

Photograph by Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux.

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